The present invention relates to a method of analyzing the operation of a cellular mobile telecommunications network comprising a set of cells each associated with a base station adapted to communicate with a mobile station present in the cell, the method comprising the following steps:
a) for each cell, collecting one or more variables characteristic of the operation of the network in said cell; and
b) supplying the or each characteristic variable in association with the collection cell.
Using workstations to display a two-dimensional map of the coverage area of a mobile telecommunications network to optimize the operation of the network is known in the art.
To this end, the workstation includes a database containing the real location in the coverage area of each base station. Each base station is associated with a cell defining a region within which mobile stations can communicate with that station. This is known in art.
For each cell, the database periodically receives one or more variables characteristic of the operation of the network in that cell.
The values of these characteristic variables are preferably known at a plurality of successive times for the same cell.
The representation of the network displayed on the base station includes a representation of each cell of the network. One or more characteristic variables of each cell is shown graphically, for example by means of different colors and/or textures representing the values of the characteristic variables on a predefined color and/or texture scale. Thus, by simple visual examination of the representation of the network, a user is able to analyze the simultaneous operating states of a large number of cells at a given time and thereby to detect certain malfunctions of the network for subsequently optimizing the network configuration.
In practice, because of the difficulty of interpreting the very large number of characteristic variables and the very large number of cells included in the representation, analyzing these representations of a network proves to be relatively complicated.